Breaking the Code (39 page)

In the Chamber, of course, I cheered on the government. In the Tea Room I raised one or two reservations with the Secretary of State [John Patten], who was looking more than ever like an oddly corsetted Regency fop. Tea cup in one hand, pinkie extended, other hand held close to chest, palm outwards, waving my concerns away, he closed his eyes, ‘Not to worry, my dear. Not to worry. Trust me,
trust me
.’

Word in the lobby is that No. 10 is briefing that the PM has rapped Portillo over the knuckles. A decision on the single European currency is a long way down the road…

We had a 9.00 a.m. meeting at the Treasury to discuss how the government can take more credit for the recovery. Stephen kicked off by identifying the problems: a) the absence of a feel-good factor, b) the extent to which any sense of recovery is believed to be despite the government not because of it! Tessa Keswick was least forthcoming. Culpin was the star – amusing, eccentric, spot-on. It was a good hour, less rambly than many and we at least emerged with some specific proposals – which Sarah Hogg should like, which Christopher Meyer will welcome, and which the Chancellor will certainly ignore!

We’re on the 11.35 train to Chester, steeling ourselves for a long afternoon and evening touring the committee rooms and polling stations.

‘A night of catastrophe for the Tories.’ Lib Dems have been trouncing us everywhere. Rotherham has a new MP, swept in on a landslide. He’s calling himself Denis MacShane
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… Can this be the Denis Matijasek I knew at Oxford? It will be rather amusing to see him again.

M has gone back to London, leaving me to spend the day visiting the Cheshire Fire Brigade, the West Cheshire College and the Chester Mobility Centre – all done on automatic pilot. At Michèle’s insistence, I now have a helper in attendance at every surgery – not in the room, but within shouting distance.

I’m just in from Upton High School and a gala gathering of girl guides – yes, hundreds of teenage girls in uniform – and I realise, while I have many weaknesses, the wrong kind of interest in seventeen-year-olds is not among them.

Here we go again. Poor Michael Brown has been outed by the
News of the World
. They are bastards. And he is a fool. He took a young man on a Caribbean holiday. There’s some dispute as to the boy’s age, but he’s certainly under twenty-one – and the eighteen-plus legislation doesn’t come onto the statute book before the autumn. He’s leaving the government. Under the circumstances (everybody realises he’s gay, don’t they?) I’m not sure how he got in. He will be very sad because he loved being a whip, relished it. When he took me to sit on the Chief Whip’s table he said to me, ‘This is the happiest dinner of my life. We shall have champagne and I shall pay. When you sit on this table, the senior whip present always pays for the wine. I never thought I could be sitting here like this.’ And now it’s over.

You’ve got to pity the poor PM too. As Michèle says, ‘That’s Back to Basics gone to buggery.’ (My wife is very funny. When Lord Caithness stepped down, M looked at a picture of him in the paper and said, ‘Well, you can’t say “Chin up!” to him, can you?’)

Ascension Day. We were in Committee Room 10, just getting into our second session on the Education Bill, it wasn’t long after ten-thirty. There was a sudden subdued flurry of people slipping into the room – someone went up and whispered to the chairman, a Labour whip passed a note along their front bench. The chairman got to his feet, ‘Order. I am afraid there has been some terrible news. John Smith has died. I believe we would want to adjourn the committee.’ There was silence. We were stunned: there was a sense of profound shock. The poor Labour people looked so bewildered: they all had tears in their eyes. We went out into the corridor: there was a complete hush. The word spread round the whole Palace in minutes, moments. The people who sit
at the tables outside the committee rooms dictating to their secretaries were packing up their papers. People really did not know what to say, where to go, what to do. The Labour people stood around in twos and threes, the women hugged one another, and I noticed that every time one of our people passed one of theirs we instinctively touched a shoulder or an arm and said ‘I’m so sorry’, and I felt we meant it.

The Tea Room was packed the rest of the morning. At their end they sat and stood, shaking their heads, some crying openly. At ours we were subdued, but once we had got the details – a heart attack this morning, around breakfast time; he’d seemed fine last night at some fund-raising dinner; Margaret Beckett will be their acting leader; there’ll be tributes in the Chamber this afternoon –
immediately
we agreed on two things: this could save Major and it’s all over for Michael Heseltine.

The PM opened the tributes and pitched it perfectly: it was simple, sincere, colloquial not oratorical – what he does best. There were nice Major touches: ‘We would share a drink – sometimes tea, sometimes not tea…’ You recognised the man he was talking about. I can’t imagine anyone on our side who could have done it better. Margaret Beckett followed. I thought she was brilliant – moving and very brave. She was sitting next to the poor man at dinner only eighteen hours ago. She kept her tears at bay with a Herculean effort. Kinnock was good, passionate, strong; Ashdown just missed it, too wordy, too much about himself; I wasn’t sure about Kaufman either. The best in a way was Tony Benn – there was old-fashioned eloquence and two messages put across in under a minute: ‘Inside John Smith burned the flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope that we can build a better world … He was a man who always said the same wherever he was. For that reason, he was trusted.’

I think I’m going to have a heart attack. No joke. When the tributes finished, around 4.15, the House adjourned and I went over to 7 Millbank to take advantage of the unexpected ‘window’ to have a catch-up session with Jenny. There was a message waiting. Would I call Maz Mahmood on ‘a personal matter’. Because I’d known him at TV-am I called. I was cheery, ‘Hi, how are things?’

‘I’m at the
News of the World now
.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

He didn’t laugh. He said, ‘We’ve had a tip-off that
The People
are going to run a story about you on Sunday.’

‘What?’

‘A story of a sexual nature.’

My heart was thumping. I said, ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing.’

‘We wondered if you’d like to talk to us first, put your side of the story.’

My mouth was dry. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘It’s about the girl who came to see you, the girl from the massage parlour, the girl from Pinkies.’

I think the number I called him on must have been his mobile: 0860-109876. He asked if he could call me back ‘on a better line’ – I presume so he could tape our conversation. I told him the line was quite good enough and that, yes, a woman had visited my surgery and that I’d reported the incident immediately to the police. I told him that I simply didn’t believe any newspaper would run a story about me ‘visiting a massage parlour’ because I had never done so – in Chester or anywhere else. I said, ‘This is a non-story that shouldn’t be dignified with comment of any kind. No one will run with it, Maz, because there’s nothing to run with.’ He then said that he’d heard that
The People
have ‘three signed affidavits from women who saw you at Pinkies.’

I told him that I didn’t believe anyone could or would run with it, expressed my sadness that he was using his talents in this ghastly way (‘I’ve got a mortgage’ he said), thanked him for calling and rang off.

I rang Tim House at Allen & Overy. His view was that it’s a ‘fishing expedition’: ‘they haven’t caught anything because there’s nothing to catch’. I then went straight over to the House. The place was deserted. I went to the Upper Whips’ Office and found Tim Wood and Irvine Patnick.
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I told them the story. (That’s one thing I have learnt: if there’s trouble brewing,
never
keep it under your hat, tell the whips.) They asked me to give them a written narrative of the whole incident – which I’ve now done and taken to them. It’s 8.00 p.m. I’m going home. I’m drained.

Last night I got back from Chester around 8.00, having spent the afternoon wandering round the Festival of Transport gladhanding and chitchatting mindlessly while all the time my stomach was churning and inside my head I kept thinking, ‘Will they dredge up something? What will they run? God, how I hate all this.’

The moment I got in Michèle said:

Needless to say, I do not feature in either
The People
or the
News of the World
– where my place is taken by poor Nick Scott
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under the headline: ‘Lying MP and the disabled bisexual’! To achieve this ludicrous headline they’ve conflated two stories: Nick, the 56-year-old minister, ‘lying’ to the House over the Disability Bill, and Nick, the young lothario, ‘cuddling and kissing’ a ‘bisexual disabled woman’/judge’s daughter on occasions unspecified but around about a quarter of a century ago! Nick shares the front page with a royal exclusive: ‘Lusty Linley made me go wild in bed … Six-foot blonde Laura Horton shared nights of passion with Viscount David Linley. “David’s a truly wonderful lover with a terrific body – and such an erotic kisser”. Full story: page 30.’

Week in, week out, these tawdry papers trample over the lives of the famous, the not-so-famous and the ever-so-slightly well-known. It’s horrendous. Footballers, actors, politicians, we’re all game. If this is the price of life in the public eye, it shouldn’t have to be. I told M – which I hadn’t told her before – that sometime last year the
Mail on Sunday
called. They spoke to one of the children, wouldn’t leave a message; it was ‘a personal matter and very urgent’, would I call back? I did – ‘We’re sorry to trouble you, but there’s a story going round that you’ve got an illegitimate child. Do you deny it?’ I do, I do, but why should I have to? Why should I have to pay for legal advice when I’ve done nothing wrong? Why should Michèle dread answering the phone in case it’s another poxy ‘investigative journalist’ with fresh tittle-tattle to relay? Why should we let ourselves become the victims of the gutter press?

I have spent the day writing all this up for the
Telegraph
. This was Michèle’s brainwave. ‘Let’s not have another week waiting and wondering and worrying what they’re going to try and dredge up for next Sunday. Let’s stop the madness now. If you write up the whole story, it’ll kill it.’

The
Telegraph
has run my piece. It looks good. The picture of me is a bit quaint (softlipped and fey), but never mind that. For some reason – I suppose to confirm that Maz really was calling from the
News of the World
– the
Telegraph
wanted me to telephone
Piers Morgan
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to tell him what I was writing. I called, got through at once (perhaps he thought I was going to offer to ‘confess’ after all?), and explained what I was up to. As they requested, I taped the call – holding my little dictating machine up to the earpiece (!) and accidentally dropping it so that it made a terrible clattering noise as it hit the desk!! Morgan said his policy is always and only to publish the truth. That I don’t dispute. The headlines can mislead, but on the whole I’m sure they do try to check the ‘facts’. My complaint is that sections of the press have created – and sections of the public have accepted – a climate in which prurience and sensationalism reign supreme and discretion has gone by the board.

Anyway the piece is in and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing. First on the line was Jonathan Aitken: ‘It’s absolutely brilliant. It needed to be said. Bravo!’ He told me he’s involved in some protracted dispute with
The Guardian
which has been using forged faxes in their desperation to dig up evidence against him. Just now I passed the Chief Whip in Members’ Lobby. I got the
impression
that the piece itself was ‘fine’ but he rather hoped I wouldn’t be milking the subject…

Ken Livingstone
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(an amusing cove, easy, friendly, pleasantly absurd) is going to stand in the Labour leadership race, but won’t declare until after John Smith’s funeral on Friday. Blair is way out front. We want Beckett or Prescott, of course. Brown might be best for them long-term: he’s the one I find most approachable, most human, and he still seems blessed with a touch of socialist zeal. However, they seem to be setting their hearts on the Young Conservative … We’re being briefed that Hezza is set to sell off Royal Mail. This isn’t news, this has been in the pipeline for months. Could it be that this briefing has been timed to remind us that,
pace
poor John Smith and his dicky heart, the President of the Board of Trade has never been fitter and – look! – here he is firing on every cylinder?

A Whitsun week of cultural treats.
King Lear
with Robert Stephens at the Barbican (
almost
as good as it gets);
Crazy for
You
at Drury Lane (my kind of show!); Beating Retreat from Michael Ancram’s window at the Northern Ireland Office; Kiri te Kanawa – on song and in the rain – at Hampton Court. Stevie [Barlow] was conducting and introduced us to the diva – who is a Big Girl. Jo [Lumley] took us and Simon and Beckie and went to
so
much
trouble with the picnic: dripping, shivering we huddled
together in our
impermiabili
pretending it was the golden summer evening it ought to have been. Bowen Wells
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happened to be there and the highlight of the night for Michèle was when I went across to his wife as she emerged from the loo and gushed one of my unctuous and effusive greetings only to be dismissed by Mrs Wells with a brisk, ‘I’m so sorry, I haven’t got time for new relationships.’